Startup and controls

Power on

Press central knob once. Brian will boot up to the main menu screen.

Rotate knob left and right to choose a desired menu item. Press the knob to activate the selection.

When a special action is available, the display will show buttons with their labels in the bottom part of the screen. The left action can be activated by pressing top left or bottom left button. Analogously for the right and center actions.

In the menu navigation, the left action takes you back, to the screen one level up.

Settings

Brian lets you configure your preferred brightness, theme color and sound volume. All of these settings are persistent across reboots. Your program has access to the currently set values and change them during its runtime in the range of 0 to the value selected in the settings. (e.g. it can dim the screen, but cannot make it more bright. It can play the audio quieter, not not more loud than set in the settings.)

Power off

Standard way to power off is from the main menu, by selecting the Power off item and confirming. Brian also features a force-power-off option, which can be used when the software is unresponsive. To trigger the force power off, press all four buttons (not the knob) simultaneously. This feature will only work properly, when not connected to the USB.

Running user programs

Users can write their own programs in any of the supported languages (currently only micro python, others are coming soon). These programs are stored on a micro sd card. The programs are loaded from the card, and the card is required to run a user program.

To start a program, make sure you have a micro SD card inserted, navigate to SD card from the main menu and find your program in the file explorer. Select the main file. This will open a screen with more details and the first option is to run the program.

More information about how to prepare the programs is in the section First program

Stopping the program

It is the programmer's responsibility to provide a mechanism to stop the program (e.g. wait for a specific button press).

If the program is stuck and this mechanism doesn't work, you can always eject the SD card. This will stop the program, but at the risk of a filesystem corruption. You can also force-power-off the entire Brian.

Sensor demo

Brian features a way how to quickly experiment with the supported sensor without writing your own program. The demo tries to detect what kind of sensor is connected to a given port and displays the value it returns. If the sensor supports multiple modes, the modes will be available to select by a Modes menu under the right button.

Navigate from the main menu to Demo programs and then Sensor view. Select a sensor port (Brian's bottom side) which you want to monitor. Grab one of the supported sensors and connect it to the specified port. You will see its corresponding data screen, and modes, if available. You can always unplug this sensor and use a different one.

Supported sensors

Currently, Brian supports these sensors:

EV3 Touch sensor
EV3 UltraSonic sensor
EV3 Gyro sensor
EV3 Color sensor
NXT Touch sensor
NXT UltraSonic sensor
NXT Sound sensor
HiTechnic Gyro sensor

[ ] Support for more sensors is planned in the future. If you need to use a specific sensor, please let us know on our feedback page GitHub issues and we will prioritize it.

Motor demo

Brian can control up to four motors connected to the motor ports (Brian's top side). The prepared demo shows control of the motor in two different modes:

Angle - rotates to the given angle and holds it there. Reacts to an external force trying to rotate the motor, by trying to keep it at the given rotation.
Speed - sets the speed of the motor, which will turn indefinitely. If an external force is braking the motor, it increases the power to keep the rotation speed stable.

Navigate from the main menu to Demo programs and then Motor demo. You will be presented with one of the two control mode. You can toggle between them any time using the right button. Connect one to four motors to the motor ports. They will be detected and start turning according to the desired input.

Next to the port icons on the left and right side a number of strength icons ( icon-power ) may appear, at the scale 0 to three icons.

Brian to Brian communication demo

Any two Brian's can be connected together using a cable from the sensor port of one, to the sensor port of the other. In this link, one has to be considered a master, and the other slave. However, this does not pose any limit on the communication itself, which is full duplex. The prepared demo in Demo programs and Brian - Brian sets the knob color of one Brian by rotating the knob on the other. The demo also supports a self-loop to demonstrate the communication with only one device.

[ ] The user programs have access to the raw communication line and can use it however they want to. We plan implementing various features needed for more advanced networking directly into the firmware for the users convenience. Some those of the features are:

Connecting more than two Brians and using the central nodes as automatic hops (similar to network switch), which will forward the messages to the intended recipients.
Standard control of another Brian's sensor and motor ports, without the need of running a special custom program on the peer.
Using motor ports for the connections. This will let you use more sensors at the expense of max motor count. We provide the flexibility, you chose what fits your application the best.